It was a very positive review, but Hamelin felt it focused too much on his abilities and technique. "You'd think I'd won a boxing match or something. The tone of the review -- I am grateful for positive reviews, but this was like, I'd successfully done a slam-bang job of a slam-bang piano recital, and I came out victorious or something," Hamelin said from his home in Boston, Mass.

"The accent was on the virtuosity and mechanical ability, and that's just not what I'm trying to project. But people come to expect this kind of thing about me, and I can't help it."

Hamelin has been playing piano since he was a 5 year old in Montreal, Quebec. He's been featured on over 50 albums, and has a wide repertoire spanning classical to modern. He has performed around the world, and his schedule for the 2011-12 season includes North America, Europe and Asia.

The Guardian (U.K.) also focused on his skill, in a Feb. 7 review of his latest London concert, noting "his sure-footed musical approach, combined with an impeccable range of technical skills."

It shouldn't be about him, Hamelin feels, it should be about the music. "The only reason I go on stage is to celebrate the miracle of human creativity. I don't go on stage for myself, and I certainly don't go on stage to flex my muscles," Hamelin said. "I go on stage to share.... I'm lucky enough to share with people what I love. How much happier I could be, I don't know."

With the KSO he will perform Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, in a program that also includes Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique."

"I'm very happy to do the fourth, it's one of the concertos that's at the top of my list," he said. Of all of Beethoven's works, "It reaches me the most, it's quite unlike any of the others. It reaches depths that the others really don't feature."

Forget the skill needed to play it, and listen for "the mystery.... One can analyze up and down, every which way, but when the mystery remains, I think that that is the mark of genius, the mark of a masterpiece."

Beethoven composed the piece as he faced a growing deafness. He also was suffering health problems -- Hamelin thinks the composer suffered from lead poisoning.

Yet, in spite of his physical troubles, Beethoven was a composer "who could express worlds of emotion in the simplest of means, with very few notes. To me that's one of the most admirable qualities any composer could have," he said.

It's beyond words' ability to explain how a composer, or musician, is "able to create an atmosphere immediately with one chord, which Beethoven manages to do in this concerto, to me that is miraculous, and it really defies explanation."